INVESTIGATING THE MODERATING ROLE OF GENDER, EXPERIENCE AND EDUCATION ON ENTREPRENEURIAL ORIENTATION AMONG CROATIAN ENTREPRENEURS

Abstract

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) represents one of the most robust scientific constructs explored by academics in management and entrepreneurship literature, where research mostly focuses on exploring EO as a firm-level or as an individual-level construct. Even though numerous studies found gender differences in EO, there is still a need to further explore differences in gender, experience and education on each of the EO dimensions separately. Therefore, the aim of this study is to further test these effects in a small open economy context such as Croatia. More specifically, by using the linear regression analysis this study will explore direct and moderating effects gender, experience and education have on EO and EO’s dimensions within the context of Croatian SMEs. Results of this study have confirmed that male entrepreneurs are more entrepreneurially oriented and are more proactive than their female counterparts. On the other hand, results indicated no significant gender differences in the level of innovation and risk taking. Furthermore, results demonstrated that gender has a significant and direct effect on EO, and on risk taking as a dimension of EO, however, there are no significant effects of gender on innovativeness and proactiveness. Results also confirmed moderation effects gender has on the relationships between the level of education and EO, innovativeness and proactiveness, where these relationships are moderated as such that the relationships are stronger for women than for men. These findings are very interesting since they place significance on the importance education has on the success of female entrepreneurs. Therefore, findings of this study provide more evidence on how important tailor-made educational programs are for the development of successful female entrepreneurs.